Of course, I am likely to be the only one who can get this “award,” since I am not privy to everyone else’s unethical thoughts. Nonetheless, this was a thought that deserves a special rebuke, and that raises many questions.
I have always been fascinated by unethical thoughts, because thoughts are not really ethical or unethical. Being ethical often requires transcending our worst instincts and selfish thoughts; one recurring theme in Julian Baggini’s collection of thought experiments, “The Pig That Wants To Be Eaten” is whether a person who automatically does the right thing is more, or possibly less, virtuous than the person who engages in the same conduct despite unethical thoughts that urge him to do otherwise. While some misguided social architects think that the way to a more ethical society is to make unethical thoughts more difficult to have through such measures as censorship and hate crime legislation, that strategy is itself unethical, offending the principle of human autonomy. An evil thought that is recognized as such, rejected and not acted upon has no true ethical implications at all.
Or does it? Where do unethical thoughts come from? Are they examples of creativity, themselves “thought experiments”? Are they randomly generated scenarios, like dreams? Are they subconscious hints of the beast within, warnings of the consequences of not having solid ethical values? Do ethical people have unethical thoughts?
I sure hope so.
The unethical thought that prompted this post occurred as I was driving back to my office for an appointment in downtown D.C. What should have been a ten minute trip was taking over thirty minutes due to a horrendous tie-up on 395 S. It was going to make me late for another appointment, and I was furious and frustrated. As I approached the cause of the delay, a morass of flashing lights, fire engines, ambulances, police cars, and undoubtedly somewhere out of sight, the wrecks of one or more vehicles, this thought popped into my brain:
“Boy, somebody better be dead if there’s going to be a delay like this!”
This caused my horrified conscience to slap the rest of my mind across its metaphorical face again and again; in fact, it is still slapping. What a horrible thing to think! Where did that come from? Was it a test, a spontaneous ethics alarm check-up? Was it self-generating black humor? How can I stop my brain from misbehaving like that, or should I even care?
After all, it was only a thought
Ethics Alarms 
Human nature is a fascinating study. It gives me so much to write about, I try to keep it short and simkple, like in “The Four Money Questions”.
http://georgesblogforum.wordpress.com/2011/06/18/the-four-money-questions/
I’ll volunteer my unethical thought: “I can only care as much about Amy Winehouse’s memory as she cared for herself…which is to say, not at all.“
Jack, knowing you as I do, my instincts say that your unethical thought — and it was a doozy — was most likely “self-generating black humor.” You have said outrageous stuff like this for years, never really meaning it. (I was going to include an example, but decided that it would be unethical, possibly libelous, to do so.) In my opinion, your extremely creative mind probably generates much more odd, funny, bizarre, silly, goofy, artistic, and — yes — unethical stuff than you could possibly even remember. The trick, of course, is recognizing which stuff to deep six and which stuff to question and which stuff to pocket for later use.
I have unethical thoughts all the time. Some are quite bloody, apocalyptic, even. My dad’s psychiatrist told him not to worry about his evil thoughts because they were just amorphous synaptic noodlings and were only of concern if the rational mind embraced them.
Fascinating. You have to know ethics to identify a thought as unethical in the first place. So do unethical people really have unethical thoughts? To sociopaths who lack empathy, we have grown to understand that there is no ethical framework in existence. Committing murder, for instance, is not seen as a crime, a violation, inhumane, etc. but a simple means to an end. Until recently in the US, corporations were not legally persons, so how could you accuse them of thinking unethically? Acting unethically, yes, but thought is something we can’t quantify, let alone prove is happening within someone else other than ourselves. Even cogito ergo sum has been disproved. I can look like I’m thinking, but am I really? And traditional Eastern meditation systems have proven that thoughts are strongly associated with emotions, which don’t necessarily have anything to do with ethics.